The Good Booklets.

The Pocket Canons: The Books of the Bible, Authorized King James Version (Grove Press, $2.95 each, $24.95 the set)

Mr. Miles, senior adviser to the president at the J. Paul Getty Trust, is the author of God: A Biography, which won a Pulitzer prize in 1996.

IN time for Christmas, Grove Press offers a boxed dozen small-print, small-sized (4" x 6") fascicles, each containing a book of the Bible in the King James Version and a brief introduction. Nine of the introductions are by novelists. The remaining three are by Bono, Thomas Cahill, and Kathleen Norris-a rock singer, a popular historian, and a memoirist.

The publishing plan evidently allows for some doubling up of shorter books (Corinthians 1 & 2 are combined) and considerable deletion from longer ones (68 of the 150 psalms have been dropped). Allowing for such adjustments, Grove can probably accommodate the 66 books of the King James Version in 60 fascicles for a total cost of $177, if purchased separately, or $125 in five boxed sets. Since the King James Version can be purchased at any bookstore for $20 or less, the appeal of this costly edition must rest primarily on the handiness of its pamphlet format and the effectiveness of its literary introductions.

Secondarily, of course, it rests on the continuing viability of a 17th- century translation. Many regard the King James Version as a masterpiece beyond all challenge. I confess that I am not among them.

Each of the Grove fascicles contains, verbatim, the same three-sentence encomium:

The Authorized King James Version of the Bible, translated between 1603 and 1611, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature. This version, more than any other, and possibly more than any other work in history, has had an influence in shaping the language we speak and write today. Presenting individual books from the Bible as separate volumes, as they were originally conceived, encourages the reader to approach them as literary works in their own right.

The first sentence in this paragraph is true. The second is debatable but defensible. (Because the Bible had had a massive cultural impact in England before English itself began to be spoken there, the King James Version may have to share the credit.) The third is problematical on two counts. First, no scholar believes that the book divisions in the King James Version coincide with the literary works of the Bible "as originally conceived." It is universally believed, for example, that Luke and Acts were conceived as a single work, not as the two works listed in the canon (with John coming between them). Second, no scholar believes that the books of the Bible affected English literature as separate, freestanding works. Long before the English language came into existence, the Bible had become the Bible in Western Christendom, the anthology functioning as a singular, definite literary and religious whole. Yes, the psalms were sometimes copied separately; so were the four Gospels. But Exodus or Amos or Ephesians alone? Even when the influence of the Bible in Europe was at its peak, separate publication of individual biblical books was generally unheard of.

These historical objections aside, the question remains: Is the King James Version really the best choice for a 21st-century reader? Those who are at home in the 17th century, the way certain English professors are, can easily translate its archaic locutions for themselves. A good many less learned readers, it would appear, are content to experience the King James Version as a kind of language poetry, allowing its cadences to wash over them without worrying too much about the sentence-by-sentence meaning. For both of these, the King James may remain the translation of choice. Those, however, who are less interested in the art of 17th-century prose than in the practice of 21st-century religion, grow impatient when they find themselves in doubt about the meaning of the text.

Consider, for example, 1 Corinthians 9:3-7 in the King James Version:

Mine answer to them that do examine me is this. Have we not power to eat and to drink? Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas? Or I only and Barnabas, have we not power to forbear working? Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? Who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? Or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock?

Are you swept away by the cadence of this prose, or do you find that the paragraph, as you read it, keeps going in and out of focus? Here, for comparison, is the New Jerusalem Bible's translation of the same passage:

To those who want to interrogate me, this is my answer. Have we not every right to eat and drink? And every right to be accompanied by a Christian wife, like the other apostles, like the brothers of the Lord, and like Cephas? Are Barnabas and I the only ones who have no right to stop working? What soldier would ever serve in the army at his own expense? And who is there who would plant a vineyard and never eat the fruit from it; or would keep a flock and not feed on the milk from his flock?

Some readers will readily understand "power to forbear working" as "the right to stop working," but others, more numerous, will not. Some will correctly understand charges in the sentence "Who goeth a warfare . . . ?" as a reference to fiscal expenditures, but others will think of cavalry charges and wonder what they are missing.

The Pocket Canons (oddly plural inasmuch as only one canon is involved) has no title-page editor. In other words, this edition is transparently a publishing-house project, and what most commends the King James Version to the publishing entrepreneur is that it resides in the public domain. More recent versions are all under copyright, and publishers aggressively collect from those who wish to reprint or even quote from their editions. The author of a book in which 25 percent of the text consisted of quotation from the Anchor Bible Gospels would owe Doubleday a royalty of 25 percent. Had Grove used the Anchor Bible instead of the King James Version for The Pocket Canons, it would have owed Doubleday, by my estimate, just under 91 percent of the proceeds. Rates like that have a way of quickly kindling a publisher's fondness for 17th-century prose.

But what, finally, of the literary introductions? Collectively, they are an impressive testimony to the continuing life of the Bible in the memory and literary imagination of England and America. Individually, they vary considerably in quality. The worst-E. L. Doctorow on Genesis and Doris Lessing on Ecclesiastes-are good but dutiful, the discharge of a chore perhaps agreed to in a weak moment. The best-David Grossman on Exodus and Barry Hannah on Mark-engage an issue that is of personal importance to the writer and that found prior and lasting expression in the text under consideration. Israeli novelist Grossman speaks poignantly of the contradictory Jewish desires to blend in and to stand apart-to live in the great world, the "Egypt" of the day, and to escape it. Hannah, a self-described "bad Christian," closes his commentary on Mark-"a brutal and exquisite work," as he calls it-with a rough but affecting poem.

Several writers embrace the frequent violence of the Bible with a kind of defiance, often adding a gloss from personal reminiscence. Darcy Steinke links John to the moment when her father, a minister, drove to the home of an elderly suicide with the girl Darcy in the front seat beside him. Charles Frazier links Job to Jonathan Edwards's scathing sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and to the darker side of his own Appalachian childhood. Francisco Goldman connects the fierceness of Matthew to the savagery of guerrilla warfare in his native Guatemala. Kathleen Norris revels (forgive the pun) in the mythic violence of Revelation, which, she believes, "uncovers the world as it is, and reveals to us our true condition." It is not that these writers actively defend Biblical brutality. But their distaste for bien-pensant agnosticism and unexamined materialism makes them hold aloft those passages which might make good exhibits for a scandalous Brooklyn Museum show called "Biblical Sensation."

There are sunnier moments. Bono recalls a not-unhappy upbringing in a mixed marriage in Dublin and tells of how "40"-the Psalm-based U2 concert-closer-came to be written. Being in a rock band is, for him, "a different kind of religion" and "not pseudo-religion either." The redoubtable Fay Weldon is amusing and then touching with the unfeminist Paul of Corinthians in her clutches.

And yet, finally, there is less here than meets the eye. Gathered together as a separate book, these mini-essays-many no longer than this review-would make a far smaller, far more informal alternative to Communion, the huge anthology of literary essays on the Old and New Testament edited by David Rosenberg and available from Barnes & Noble at the remainder price of $6.98. At $6.98 (and bring your own translation), the twelve essays of The Pocket Canons might be worth having. At $24.95 for the set, they are grossly overpriced except perhaps for the reader who wants to have a morsel of Holy Writ on his or her person at all times. I am not such a reader, and so cannot welcome this package as a vade mecum. If you are, then vade tecum, and prosit lectori lectio.